A set of simple web servers, all written in C, using different techniques, reflected by their names:

• serial
• fork
• pool
• select
• poll
• epoll

Static content only

These web servers do not support CGI. See the webservers-cgi project for CGI-enabled web servers.

Bugs!

Connection reset has been observed with at least the following server types:

webserver-epoll
webserver-poll
webserver-select

Build all the servers

cd serial-fork-pool-async
make all

Start a server

./webserver-<SERVER-TYPE> <port> <backlog> [<nchildren>]

Example

./webserver-epoll 12345 10

Security warning

The web server gives you read access to your entire file system, so don't make it public!

Use any client

Telnet:

telnet 0 12345
GET / HTTP/1.0
<ENTER>
<ENTER>

Browser:

http://0:12345

Backlog

The backlog number is the maximum allowed number of pending connections.
The system wide maximum default number on a Linux machine is found in /proc/sys/net/core/somaxconn, and often defaults to 128.

Read more about backlog:

man (2) listen

How TCP backlog works in Linux

Child processes

The nchildren argument is only mandatory for webserver-pool, to specify the number of child processes.